Anders Petersen's Soho - in pictures

The seedy streets that Anders Petersen walked in the 70s had been transformed when he returned last year. But his new images – which have all the graininess and character of another age – pick out the messy human heart that beats beneath the gloss

Soho by Anders Petersen is published by Mack/the Photographers' Gallery £40
mackbooks.co.uk

London 238 Petersen describes his way of looking as being imbued with “a kind of poetic sadness”. You can detect this, too, in his Soho pictures: in the people he chose to photograph, the places he visited on his night-time wanderings and the way he uses graininess and high-contrast tones to accentuate his essentially melancholy vision

London 248 Born in Stockholm in 1944, Petersen is best known for his seminal book of intimate reportage, Café Lehmitz, which was first published in 1978 and is recognised as one of the classics of postwar European photography. For the Soho project, he spent just over three weeks in 2011 shooting in the neighbourhood. He began in March, when it was “too cold at night” and returned in June, when “it was the perfect mix of shop light and sunlight”

London 227 He has two basic ways of working: the fleeting snapshot, of which he is a master, and the posed portrait. For the latter, he haunted the bars, clubs and cafes of Soho, befriending people he liked the look of and asking them to pose for him

London 15 “I have nothing against colour," Petersen says, "but, for me, there are so many colours in black and white. You can use your imagination more that way – put your own colours into the pictures”

London 98 The photographs were shot in various famous and infamous Soho haunts, from the French House to Blacks private members’ club, as well as in several burlesque bars and dingy upstairs rooms where “models” entertain their clientele